The Sofa - by Sam Munson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Kafkaesque slow-burn domestic horror from a master of the uncanny.

Mr. Montessori and his family return home from a trip to the beach to discover that their sofa is different. Once dark and contemporary, it's now antique, green and yellow, and smelling faintly of damp.

Its appearance and origins are a mystery. A joke? An inverted theft? A break in the fabric of reality? Yes, the police take the "crime" seriously. But what happens next lies outside their expertise. Strange sounds in the night. A half-bathroom toilet with a mind of its own. Odd, fleeting glimpses of something (or someone) in mirrors. The inexplicable vision of Montessori's neighbor: He swears he saw a burglar. . . .

Montessori's quest for answers will take him to a dank highway overpass in decayed upstate New York, a very strange dry-cleaning supply concern in outermost Queens, and into the depths of an eerie, warped forest where time and space no longer connect, all while putting his ever-more-troubled marriage and young family in grave danger. But that's what it costs to find out if we own our possessions -- or if they own us.

Munson emerges as a master stylist in this tense, taut work of surreal humor and psychological horror.

Review Quotes

"The Sofa captures the vertiginous moment when the world shifts and seems to turn against you, when your bad luck stops feeling random and instead starts to seem like the working of a malevolent consciousness peeking at you through the veil. It is unsettling, funny, and sickening by turns--and it made me really appreciate my old familiar couch, which I truly hope no-one steals out of my apartment anytime soon."

--Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person and Other Stories

"When his family's sofa goes missing, Mr. Montessori sets out to solve the mystery. His efforts make a kind of absurdist hero journey, a history of accidents, coincidences, and personal injuries. The Sofa is a fantastic, funny, and smart work, a story driven forward by Sam Munson's gift for building narrative reality in an increasingly unreal world. The Sofa is a wonderful book."
--Donald Antrim, author of The Emerald Light in the Air

"Munson's prose is understated, competent, comic, and beautiful. In other words, The Sofa is everything you want from literary horror. Perfect dementia-core."
--Gabriel Smith, author of Brat

"A weird hug of a novel. A nightmare, warm and cozy."
--Adam Levin, author of Mount Chicago

"The Sofa resides at the intersection of The Diary of a Nobody, The Shining, and Eraserhead. It is subtle and gripping and generally quite fabulous."
--Simon Doonan, author of The Camp 100 - Glorious Flamboyance from Louis XIV to Lil Nas X

"The Sofa is a wildly entertaining conceptual novel that threatens to upend Mr. Montessori's family life despite our tense protestations to leave it alone."
--Mauro Javier Cárdenas, author of Aphasia and American Abductions

Praise for Sam Munson

"Munson is a champion stylist." --Jason Sheehan, NPR (from their review of Dog Symphony)

"The strangest transmogrification of a writer in recent memory." --Kirkus Reviews (from their review of Dog Symphony)